Most traditional power plants create electricity with steam. The water heats up, evaporates into steam, and the steam is used to push and spin these turbines that turn mechanical energy to electrical energy. At first glance, the prospect of using steam seems like an environmentally friendly option. That’s until you realize that to get steam in large amounts, you would need to burn coal, fuel, or natural gas.
This is all about to change. A NET Power team in Texas is currently developing a power plant that gets its energy from carbon dioxide instead of steam.
The design involves replacing the old ‘boil water and collect the steam’ method with super-heated and pressurized carbon dioxide gas. At these conditions, carbon dioxide will reach a supercritical state, meaning it is in between two states of matter. In this case, it fills up space like a gas, but has the density of a liquid. Using carbon dioxide this way would allow the use of much smaller turbines that generate just as much electrical energy.
It’ll be the first of its kind to ever be created, marking a huge step towards green energy production in the larger scales.
Source: Futurism
This method is not only more environmentally friendly because of the fact that it uses smaller turbines, but also because the natural gas burned to heat up the CO2 is pure oxygen. This allows the release of pure carbon dioxide only, removing all those nasty byproducts that traditional power plants have. While it isn’t 100% harmful emission free and environmentally friendly, it is still much cleaner and greener than previous methods of producing electricity.
One challenge the team must face though is the fact that making carbon dioxide reach a supercritical state is very difficult. That along with building turbines much smaller than usual is tough to accomplish. However, if the team is successful in building such a thing, it’ll be one big step in the fight against fossil fuel consumption. After a “test plant” has been built and deemed successful, a larger and more powerful final power plant to be built could power 200,000 homes.
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